His slingshot nailed Goliath. His playing on the harp refreshed the gloomy tyrant Saul. As king, he capered before the Ark while his wife looked on with the cold eyes of a princess compelled into marriage to a shepherd. His lust, his connivance, his nobility, his subtlety, the ruthlessness he shared with his divine sponsor Yahweh—these are things that we know, or think we know, about David.

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Politically, though, who was he? Can we locate this extraordinary character and his legend within a recognizable landscape of Bronze Age kingship and conquest?

At Boston College in March a group of experts was convened over two days to probe, as far as possible, the political realities of the Davidic state. Organized by David Vanderhooft of the theology department, and modestly billed as a “colloquy,” the event matched Old Testament scholars with political scientists, Boston College faculty with visiting specialists. Around 15 people were in attendance for the colloquy, sponsored by the theology department, the Initiative for the Study of Constitutional Democracy, the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning, and the Institute for the Liberal Arts. They met first in Gasson Hall and then, for the second day, in the Murray Room at the Yawkey Center. Presentations proceeded with no great emphasis on formality, segueing into open and often fast-moving discussion.

Vanderhooft marked out the territory in his prefatory remarks. “We have no sophisticated analysis of the politics of David,” he said. “If, as Baruch Halpern [of Penn State, and a conference participant] has suggested, David is the first human being in world literature, might he also be the first politician? Was there a ramified bureaucracy in David’s time—anything we can reconstruct?” The conversations that followed offered glimpses of such a reconstruction—of David conspiring, negotiating, acting, and ruling in a light rather more practical than the one shed by salvation history.

As far as Raymond Cohen, the Corcoran Visiting Chair at Boston College’s Center for Christian-Jewish Learning, was concerned, the biblical account of David contained “elements of great king diplomacy, but diluted and a little bit barbarized.” David’s mistreatment of envoys, for example, betrayed “a certain [political] clumsiness.” How skillful a king was he? There followed a detailed discussion of the assassination of Abner, David’s wayward general, prompting one of the participants to vault several millennia and tap the wisdom of another great political intriguer, Talleyrand: “Worse than a crime, it was [a political] error.”

The next conversation, led by Amanda Podany, professor of history at California State Polytechnic, shifted toward the minutiae of Bronze Age political discourse. “Wherefore Hanun took David’s servants, and shaved off the one half of their beards, and cut off their garments in the middle, even unto their buttocks, and sent them away” (2 Samuel, 10:4)—did this operation involve a hacking-off of the lower portion of the beard, or (more savagely) a deforestation of one side of the face? Podany also called attention to a number of surviving letters in which monarchs of the ancient world held forth upon the gift exchanges by which alliances were cemented. One in particular, from King Ishi-Adad to King Ishme-Dagan, lowered us into the unglamorous details of Bronze Age political life. “Right now,” lamented Ishi-Adad, “just to relieve my feelings, I must speak about this matter which should not be spoken about. You are a great king; you made a request to me for two horses, and I had them conducted to you. But you gave me 20 minas of tin!” Donkey burials were also discussed, the dignity of the ass and his relation to kingship. Podany’s central point: In terms of what we know of political history, there is “nothing jarring” in the biblical account of David and his successor Solomon. Scripture gives us “a state that is familiar, more or less, with what was going on in the late Bronze Age, using the same mechanisms of international relations.”

Day one concluded with a presentation from New York University Judaic scholar Daniel Fleming, during which it was suggested that Absalom’s attempt to overthrow David was “a political impossibility”—not simply tragic, then, but strategically hopeless. The group tarried on the enjoyable topic of assassination, an important political maneuver in David’s time. Commented someone: “The constant is: trying to kill the king. The variable is: How good is his guard?” After which, the scholars all repaired to Legal Sea Foods for their dinner.

On day two the Boston College theology tag team of Jeffrey Cooley and David Vanderhooft reported on “Divination and the Politics of Royal Legitimation.” Boiled down to its purest definition, Cooley told the group, divination is simply “a method by which humans determine divine will.” And how might the divine will signal its intent? Via celestial omens (shooting stars) or terrestrial ones (a fox running into the middle of the village and dropping dead). Or via the spread entrails of an animal, peered into by a practitioner of the art of extispicy. These genres were not incompatible: A celestial omen might be tested with a bit of extispicy—double-checked, in effect. David double-checked his omens in 2 Samuel 5, inquiring twice of the Lord whether he should proceed militarily against the Philistines. In the final talk, historian Baruch Halpern argued from the Scriptural evidence of Samuel and Kings that David was more of a politician than his royal contemporaries, whose chronicles tend to offer litanies of straightforward conquests. David, by contrast, is shown exercising the kind of frenetic and cagey alliance-building that would be required of a hopeful usurper, of a mercenary chieftain with no army or great house behind him, but with a sharp eye for the main chance.

As he does in the Bible, the ancient hero slipped trickster-ishly in and out of focus across the two-day conversation: One moment we were deep in gangland politics, with David as capofamiglia and the Davidic state a Sopranos-style tangle of rival bloodlines; the next he was primly cocking an ear to God. In the open conversation that followed Halpern’s talk, the ancient king became positively phantasmal. Did he exist or not? How much confidence can we have in the biblical account of this person? NYU’s Fleming sounded an insistent note of caution: “I don’t want to linger over it, but these [facts] are really in play. There are groups of biblical scholars, in Europe particularly, who are far less trusting of these sources,” believing the texts to be apologias drawn up centuries after David’s death, for political and diplomatic reasons.

“But if it’s a later text,” countered Cooley, “a legendary text, why would [the authors] include such embarrassing stuff? Because we see in the Books of Chronicles”—a later, soberer account of the biblical royalty narratives—”that they get rid of the embarrassing stuff.”

Ah, the embarrassing stuff. The human stuff. David in royal old age, his whittled-away body getting a warm-up from Abishag the Shunammite. A politician to the very end, we might say.